>Is there an easy guide to create a windows version of SpamAssasin?
>Or is there a precompiled windows version?
SA comes in two fundamentally different forms.
At the primitive level, there are all-in-one processes: spamassassin.pl
(interpreted by the ActivePerl script engine) and spamassassin.exe (actually a
perl2exe bundle with the Perl runtime module inside, since the base language of
SA is always Perl). I've found that neither of these are suitable for Windows
mail servers over a few thousand messages per day. The main reason is startup
overhead. Each process runs independently -- just like old Declude and Sniffer
before they introduced their "persistent" processes -- and so your system
endures loading Perl, the regex rulesets, the add-ons, etc. with every message,
even before *running* the rules. It's notable that Windows is relatively poor
at such process-based architectures, regardless of the application; there are
*nix users who use spamassassin.pl who are able to handle much higher loads.
However, any platform is handicapped by the process-per-message overhead as
load grows.
The alternative to process-per-message is SPAMD, the SA persistent process.
With SPAMD, the rules are loaded only once, so there is no repetition of this
step for every message, giving vast increases in performance. Better yet,
SPAMD is a TCP/IP server that doesn't have to run on the same box as your
mailserver. Your mailserver only needs to run SPAMC32 (the client portion),
which has 0% overhead after it spools the message over to SPAMD -- it spends
the rest of its time waiting silently for a response from SPAMD. If you run
multiple SPAMD servers, SPAMC32 can load-balance requests among them, so you
can continually shed load off your mailserver (obvs. especially valuable if it
is also a mailbox server).
I answered in such an extended fashion because it's vital to know _which_
SpamAssassin you are trying to find/compile/run. If you want to run SA in
process-per-message mode, you want spamassassin.exe. If you want to run SPAMD
on Windows, Google 'spamd cygwin'. If you have a spare workstation, though, I
would recommend that your very first step be finding a *nix distro on CD that
includes SPAMD. SPAMC32 can connect to a remote SPAMD regardless of platform.
I am _never_ one to claim that a Windows shop can support a production *nix
install at the same level that they support their Windows servers. But using a
CD-based *nix to get SPAMD running quickly is likely the best way to test the
functionality, instead of (a) getting lost in the admittedly complex setup of
SPAMD on Windows, or (b) using process-per-message SA and finding its
performance unacceptable.
--Sandy
--
Sanford Whiteman, Chief Technologist
Broadleaf Systems, a division of
Cypress Integrated Systems, Inc.
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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